Mysterious East Coast Boom Was Falling Russian Rocket

Editor's Note: On Tuesday, astronomers agreed that this event was most likely caused by a natural meteor. Click here to read the latest account.

The
mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was
not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a
Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the
U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm
pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz
rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester
of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Residents
of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 last
night with reports of hearing a loud
boom and seeing a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news
reports.

Chester
heard about the incident this morning; the Naval Observatory gets plenty of
reports of such fireballs and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor
or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk
that were coming up," he told SPACE.com.

He checked
the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from
their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of
the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday was slated
to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. last night.

The
Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport
of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American
billionaire Charles Simonyi - the world's first two-time space tourist - to the
International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived
at the space station on Saturday.

Chester ran a satellite tracking program
that showed that the rocket debris should have come down exactly in the area
where the fireball was spotted.

"This
is just too much of a coincidence to be coincidence," he said.

Chester
said that U.S. Space Surveillance Network had not yet confirmed that this was
the case, but said that he was "99 and four one-hundredths [percent]
convinced that this is what it is."

The
descriptions of the boom and streak of light reported by local residents were
"entirely consistent with re-entering space junk, especially something
this big," Chester said.

Delta
airline pilot Bryce Debban reported seeing the streak of light on a flight from
Boston to Raleigh-Durham when his plane was about 31,000 feet in the air.

"We
saw it streak across the sky and then blow up," Debban told SPACE.com.
"It was brighter than the full moon. It lit up the cockpit as if it were
daylight."

James
Zimbelman of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Center for Earth
and Planetary Sciences said that the explosion being caused by a re-entering
rocket was very plausible. It "sounds all too reasonable," he said.

A rocket
stage would fragment and explode "just as if it were a meteorite," he
said. And the size of the rocket would explain why the explosion was seen over
so wide an area.

The Soyuz
rockets jettison their second stage after entering orbit in such a way that the
second stage will slowly fall back to earth in a few days. But "you can
control precisely where these things are going to come down," Chester said.

It's
possible that some fragments of the rocket made it to the Earth's surface, but
they would likely have a couple of hundreds of miles east of Cape Hatteras, Chester said.

Andrea is the managing editor for OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to SPACE.com. Prior to the launch of OurAmazingPlanet, Andrea was Senior Writer for LiveScience and SPACE.com. She graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in 2004 and a Master's in the same subject in 2006. She attended the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University and graduated with a Master of Arts in 2006. To find out what her latest project is, you can follow Andrea on Google+.